Trivendra Singh Rawat Sworn In As Uttarakhand Chief Minister
Seven cabinet minister and two ministers of state took oath along with Rawat
BJP leader Trivendra Singh Rawat was sworn in as Uttarakhand Chief Minister on Saturday.
Governor KK Paul administered the oath of office and secrecy to 56-year-old Rawat, a former RSS pracharak, and nine ministers at a ceremony attended by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, BJP chief Amit Shah and other national and state party leaders.
Satpal Maharaj, Harak Singh Rawat, Madan Kaushik, Arvind Pandey, Subodh Uniyal, Yashpal Arya and Prakash Pant have been made Cabinet ministers.
Rekha Arya and Dhan Singh Rawat took oath as ministers of state.
The BJP decimated the Congress in the assembly election, winning 57 of the 70 seats.
Coupled with his administrative and organisational skills and experience, Rawat's loyalty to the party and RSS ideology catapulted him to the top post in the state.
Rawat was appointed the party's national secretary in 2013. He was later made co-incharge of the party's affairs in Uttar Pradesh in 2014. He was BJP in-charge of Jharkhand ahead of the crucial assembly election, a responsibility he discharged well to further strengthen the party leadership's trust in him.
He had wrested the Doiwala seat from Congress with an impressive margin of 24,869 votes to win it for the third time.
Rawat also has considerable administrative experience as he was a minister in the BJP governments led by BC Khanduri and Ramesh Pokhriyal Nishank.
So impressed was Home Minister Rajnath Singh with his unflinching devotion that while asking people to vote for Rawat, he had said, “Trivendra Singh Rawat ne kabhi apni nishtha nahin badli (he never switched his loyalty).”
Born in December 1960 into a family where serving in the armed forces was a tradition, with his father Pratap Singh Rawat in Garhwal Rifles, he studied in a school built of mud and thatch in his native village of Khairasain in Pauri Garhwal district.
He is the ninth and youngest of his siblings who have still not forgotten their rural roots.
Though average in studies, Rawat evinced keen interest in socio-cultural work at an early age and joined the RSS when he was 19 years old. Six years later he was appointed RSS pracharak for Dehradun city.
After an active association with the RSS for nearly 14 years, he was made BJP's organisational secretary. He was also actively associated with the Uttarakhand statehood agitation during which he was arrested several times.
Rawat, who is a post graduate in journalism from Garhwal University's Shrinagar campus, worked for many years as pradesh BJP organisation secretary before being elected for the first time from Doiwala seat in the state's first assembly elections in 2002. Rawat won again in 2007 and was made agriculture minister.
Rawat had lost the Doiwala seat in a bypoll to Congress's Hira Singh Bisht in 2014, a defeat widely attributed to the infighting in the party.
In a state where ruling parties have survived on wafer-thin margins, Rawat will head a government which has two-thirds majority, thus allowing stability and making it easier for him to pursue the agenda put forth by Modi.
However, he will have the task of satisfying regional aspirations while taking along all sections in the party, which has been plagued by infighting in the past.
Considered a man rooted in rural traditions, Rawat loves hill delicacies and keeps visiting his village from time to time to relish those, especially during winter when he loves to eat millet (Manduwa) rotis, his elder brother Veerendra says.
One of his elder brothers is the post master of the village post office at Khairasain, while another grows aromatic plants on a piece of land near Jahariyakhal on a commercial scale.
